L2/04-NNN
Date: May 26, 2004
Subject: Report on IRG #22
Source: John Jenkins
The 22nd meeting of the IRG was held in Chengdu, Sichuan, China from 24
through 27 May 2004. I attended for the US and for the UTC. Hideki
Hiura of Sun was unable to attend because of illness. Representatives
were present from the following IRG members: China (PRC), Taiwan, Hong
Kong SAR, Macao SAR, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, and Vietnam.
Only Singapore had no representation at the meeting. Michael Kung of
Microsoft was also present as an individual contributor.
There are some important results from the meeting and some action items
for the UTC and/or L2. (This is done without the formal resolutions in
front of me. I'll submit them as a UTC document later. I just wanted
to get some of the juicier stuff out right away.) The latter first:
1) Once again, the issue of the IRG maintaining a standing document
giving its formal unification rules came up. This has come up
periodically, but nothing ever comes from it. I think that we should
ask WG2 to tell the IRG to create and maintain such a standing
document. It's ludicrous that we have no collective memory of
unification precedents beyond what's in Annex S.
2) If we want to have a new CJK stroke block to house the stroke-like
characters from HK SCS, we should have a document specifically about
this issue and this issue alone. Right now, it's buried within
L2/04-161.
The IRG informally agreed that the stroke-like characters from HK SCS
might best be encoded in a CJK Stroke block separate from the
ideographs. Members are to send feedback to Mr. Zhang in time for the
upcoming WG2 meeting. The IRG is willing to accept the removal of
these characters from Extension C1. There was also no objections
voiced here with removing the actual ideographs from HK SCS and
subjecting them to a "fast track" process, although if Extension C1
will be ready by 2005 that may be moot.
The IRG also agreed to add two new characters from the most recent HK
SCS. Hong Kong issued the new HK SCS earlier this year, with sixteen
new ideographs, fourteen of which can be mapped to existing ideographs.
The remaining two are now in the C1 bucket.
The position on Old Hanzi is pretty much as it was at IRG 21. (Because
there was only one of me, I wasn't able to attend all the break-out
sessions and was therefore not involved in the Old Hanzi discussions.)
The IRG continues to recommend that all the various Old Hanzi varieties
be separately encoded.
IICore (the basic ideograph set) is now complete. It's a bit slimmer;
China removed 2000 characters, and it's down to about 9800.
The IRG is committed to having Extension C1 finished by the end of the
year.
Mr. Zhang's latest term as rapporteur is ending. The IRG recommends
Dr. Lu Qin of Hong Kong as the new rapporteur. (This decision was
made, by the way, in a literally smoke-filled room.) The clear
preference was for Mr. Zhang to continue, but China was unwilling to
support this. (It's clear that there are some nasty internal Chinese
politics going on here.) There was also the suggestion to ask SC2 for
the creation of a new vice-rapporteurship to spread some of the burden
out. (The original intent was also to ease Dr. Lu into the world of
WG2, but since Mr. Zhang had to withdraw as a candidate for rapporteur,
that came not to pass.) This didn't pass but will be discussed at the
next IRG.
The discussion on who should be the next rapporteur was long and took
up much of the last portions of the meeting, and because there was a
group meal scheduled as soon as the meeting ended, things got
enormously rushed. As a result, I wasn't able to inform the IRG of the
glyphs defect which we've found, nor to give my demo on variation
selectors and Han. Nor was I able to voice our objections to encoding
seal forms as a separate script, since I wasn't able to get to the Old
Hanzi sessions and the final resolutions were not individually
approved. I'll stay on top of these and submit documents for future
IRG consideration.
The next IRG meeting will be in late November in Jeju, South Korea.
The current provisional schedule is for meeting #24 to be hosted by
Taiwan. The IRG hopes that it will be possible for Unicode (or someone
else) to host meeting #25 in the United States in the fall of 2005.
Dr. Lu, BTW, is working on creating Cantonese readings for everything
in the BMP. Where no authoritative source can be found, she'll be
creating one (marked as such). She's willing to donate this data to us
for internal use, and for exposure in the on-line Unihan database. She
would rather not have it included in the text copy of the Unihan
database, because she'd like to exert a bit more control over its use
than that. I've also talked over the problems of getting frequency
data on HK SCS characters with Dr. Lu and other members of the HK
delegation. Dr. Lu has some data files she'll send me, and they had
some people I can follow up with for further information.
========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jhjenkins@mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/